Identify plants, birds and insects

Plants, birds and insects — Google’s AIY Vision classifiers (birds, insects), MobileNet V2 networks trained on photos contributed to iNaturalist (a subset of the iNaturalist 2017 competition dataset, organised by Visipedia). They were made for the AIY Vision Kit’s "Nature Explorer" and are published under the Apache License 2.0. The 8-bit TensorFlow Lite versions are served from this site, unmodified, and run in the page with TensorFlow.js TFLite (Apache-2.0). Each identification takes a few tens of milliseconds. The labels are scientific names, as in the models' own label maps.

Your own labels — OpenAI’s CLIP (ViT-B/32, MIT licence) compares the picture with a list of words and ranks them. Choose a ready-made list (garden plants, trees, mushrooms, dog and cat breeds, everyday things) or type your own. CLIP can only pick from the list you give it, so include a "none of these" style label if you are unsure. It runs in a background worker through transformers.js (Apache-2.0).

Nothing is downloaded until you use a model, and then only once — the browser caches the files. The picture itself is never sent anywhere.

The look-up links (Wikipedia, iNaturalist) are ordinary links: nothing is fetched from them unless you click.

These are small models meant for a phone: treat the answer as a good hint, not a verdict. They know only the species they were trained on — mostly wild North American and European species seen on iNaturalist — so a houseplant, a cultivated variety or a rare species may come back as its closest relative, with high confidence. The percentage is the model’s own score, not a guarantee.

Save to history keeps the result and a small thumbnail in this browser only (localStorage, up to 40 entries). Export CSV downloads them; Clear history removes them.

Present (or F) shows the camera or photo full screen with the best match in large type over it — for a nature walk on a tablet or a classroom screen. Space or Enter identifies again; with Keep identifying ticked the label follows the camera. A link with Start automatically turns on live identification; browsers need a click before a page may use the camera, so it shows a "Click to start" button first.

Share link copies a URL with the model, the CLIP label list (or your own labels) and whether live identification is on. You can also write one by hand: ?model=birds, ?model=clip&preset=trees, ?model=clip&preset=custom&labels=oak,maple,birch.